T.S. Eliot

Quotes

• “If we take the widest and wisest view of a Cause, there is no such thing as a Lost Cause because there is no such thing ...”
• “One thing you cannot know: The sudden extinction of every alternative, The unexpected crash of the iron cataract. You do...”
• “Will the veiled sister pray for Those who walk in darkness, who chose thee and oppose thee, Those who are torn on the ho...”
• “There will be time, there will be timeTo prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;There will be time to murder and...”
• “We are being made aware that the organization of society on the principle of private profit, as well as public destructi...”
• “The Pekes and the Pollicles, everyone knows, Are proud and implacable, passionate foes;It is always the same, wherever o...”
• “Time and the bell have buried the day,The black cloud carries the sun away.Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clema...”
• “One error, in fact, of eccentricity in poetry is to seek for new human emotions to express; and in this search for novel...”
• “The emotion of art is impersonal. And the poet cannot reach this impersonality without surrendering himself wholly to th...”
• “A martyrdom is always the design of God, for His love of men, to warn them and to lead them, to bring them back to His w...”
• “No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be; Am an attendant lord, one that will do To swell a progress, start a sce...”
• “Time present and time pastAre both perhaps present in time futureAnd time future contained in time past.If all time is e...”
• “You gave me hyacinths first a year ago; They called me the hyacinth girl.' —Yet when we came back, late, from the Hyaci...”
• “When the Stranger says: “What is the meaning of this city ?Do you huddle close together because you love each other?”Wha...”
• “It seems that one ought to read in two ways: 1) because of a particular and personal interest, which makes the thing one...”
• “There is shadow under this red rock // (Come in under the shadow of this red rock) // And I will show you something diff...”
• “Everyone’s alone—or so it seems to me.They make noises, and think they are talking to each other;They make faces, and th...”
• “There are three conditions which often look alikeYet differ completely, flourish in the same hedgerow:Attachment to self...”
• “But the Church cannot be, in any political sense, either conservative or liberal, or revolutionary. Conservatism is too ...”
• “Believe me, Michael:Those who flee from the past will always lose the race.I know this from experience. When you reach y...”
• “If time and space, as sages say,Are things which cannot be,The sun which does not feel decayNo greater is than we.So why...”
• “The world turns and the world changes,But one thing does not change.In all of my years, one thing does not change,Howeve...”
• “The dripping blood our only drink,The bloody flesh our only food:In spite of which we like to thinkThat we are sound, su...”
• “They constantly try to escapeFrom the darkness outside and withinBy dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need...”
• “My nerves are bad to-night. Yes, bad. Stay with me. 'Speak to me. Why do you never speak? Speak. 'What are you thinkin...”
• “Thus with most careful devotionThus with precise attentionTo detail, interfering preparationOf that which is already pre...”
• “Think neither fear nor courage saves us.Unnatural vices are fathered by our heroism. Virtues are forced upon us by our i...”
• “About anyone so great as Shakespeare, it is probable that we can never be right; and if we can never be right, it is bet...”
• “And right action is freedom from past and future also.For most of us, this is the aim never to be realized. Who are only...”
• “Do not let me hearOf the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of posse...”
• “What is hell? Hell is oneself. Hell is alone, the other figures in it Merely projections. There is nothing to escape fro...”
• “Though you forget the way to the Temple,There is one who remembers the way to your door: Life you may evade, but Death y...”
• “What the dead had no speech for, when living,They can tell you, being dead: the communicationOf the dead is tongued with...”
• “As she laughed I was aware of becoming involved in her laughter and being part of it, until her teeth were only accident...”
• “Time for you and time for me, And time yet for a hundred indecisions, And for a hundred visions and revisions, Before th...”
• “Footfalls echo in the memorydown the passage we did not taketowards the door we never openedinto the rose garden. My wor...”
• “Two people who know they do not understand each other, breeding children whom they do not understand and who will never ...”
• “To country people Cows are mild,And flee from any stick they throw;But I’m a timid town bred child,And all the cattle se...”
• “The backward look behind the assuranceOf recorded history, the backward half-lookOver the shoulder, towards the primitiv...”
• “I have a Gumbie Cat in mind, her name is Jennyanydots;Her coat is one of the tabby kind,with tiger stripes and lepard sp...”
• “And the wind shall say: 'Here were decent Godless people:Their only monument the asphalt roadAnd a thousand lost golf ba...”
• “Between the desireAnd the spasm,Between the potencyAnd the existence,Between the essenceAnd the descent,Falls the Shadow...”
• “A prose that is altogether alive demands something of the reader that the ordinary novel reader is not prepared to give.”
• “This is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsThis is the way the world endsNot with a bang but a whimper.”
• “Under the penitential gatesSustained by staring SeraphimWhere the souls of the devoutBurn invisible and dim.”
• “You cannot face it steadily, but this thing is sure,That time is no healer: the patient is no longer here.”
• “Streets that follow like a tedious argumentOf insidious intentTo lead you to an overwhelming question...”
• “We have only to conquer Now, by suffering. This is the easier victory.Now is the triumph of the cross.”
• “We ask only to be reassuredAbout the noises in the cellarAnd the window that should not have been open”
• “Your burden is not to clear your conscienceBut to learn how to bear the burdens on your conscience.”